Powers Comic to Become PlayStation TV Series

Part gritty cop drama. Part superhero comic. The graphic novel Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming seemed destined for a live-action adaptation from the moment issues first hit stands. After an entire television pilot was made for and scrapped by the FX channel in 2011, however, there was a chance that this might never happen. Now, it looks to be that the live-action Powers will finally take to the streets.

According to Deadline, Powers is being developed by Sony Pictures TV as an exclusive series for the growing PlayStation Network video service. The TV series will take the form of a live-action, hour-long show, with approximately 10 episodes in the first season. Charlie Huston is the scriptwriter on the new Powers pilot, and former Falling Skies head writer Remi Aubuchon also is on board to share showrunner duties with Huston. Original comic book creators Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming are included as executive producers.

Written by Bendis with art by Oeming, Powers is an award-winning comic that has been running through various iterations since 2000. The comic mashes up cop drama with superpowers, as two Chicago Homicide detectives try to maintain order in a world where powered heroes and villains exist. Their beat is costumed crime -- they investigate the suspicious deaths of those with special abilities. Powers is a dark story once described by FX's President as "...in the model of David Fincher's Seven and Zodiac or The Shield. It's a really gritty, edgy, very real cop show. It also happens to have superhero elements in it, but not front and center – they're around the margins and the back of it."

A pilot episode of Powers was produced for FX in 2011, starring Jason Patric and Lucy Punch. It did not lead to an order for more episodes, and the pilot was never released to the public. Actors from that pilot episode have since been released from the production, and this new version of Powers will likely feature a new cast.

Despite passing on the first version of the show, FX continued to stress that Powers was alive and an important project for the company. Much like The Walking Dead was a comic book that meshed perfectly with the AMC style of storytelling when it was adapted for TV, Powers was being created for television as a show to fit in with FX's own original programs such as Sons of Anarchy and The Americans. It was while Powers was still with FX that Charlie Huston (known for his work on Moon Knight) came aboard; Huston is now said to be leading this PlayStation Network version of the show.

Over the years, IGN has made it a personal mission to ask studio heads about plans for the Powers TV show at every major industry event. Here's what FX’s president John Landgraf had to say in IGN's 2013 interview about Powers:

"We’ve been through so many incarnations. After we made the pilot, we actually developed three more [episode] scripts. So then we had a pilot plus three scripts, and we decided between the pilot and the scripts that it wasn’t quite the series that we needed it to be. When I say we, by the way, Brian Bendis is involved in every phase of this conversation and discussion. But one of the scripts was written by this guy named Charlie Huston, and he was a novelist. Both I and Brian and others thought, “Wow, there is actually something in the tone of this.” So Charlie was approached, I think by Brian, and said, “Look, would you be interested in taking on Powers?” And Charlie said, “Well, I’ve never actually adapted anything before in my life. I have only written novels and stuff of my own, but Powers is my favorite graphic novel, and yes!”

So what ended up happening was we reconstituted the whole thing around Charlie as the creator, with Brian. Charlie went up to Seattle, and they sat down and they talked, and read through all the books, and they came back with a new vision, basically. Essentially, a new pilot to begin with, which is a new, different story than the pilot that we shot. So that pilot is officially gone and dead, and the actors are all gone, but we’re developing a whole new pilot from scratch."

Sony is eager to gain a foothold in the streaming video market, as services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are quickly defining what the future of television watching will be for the next generation of cord-cutters. The company became a pioneer in producing original content available only via streaming when the anime Xam'd debuted exclusively on PSN in 2008. The video game reality show The Tester also was made exclusively for PlayStation Network and ran for three seasons. Not to be outdone, rival Microsoft also has exclusive programming in the works, with a Halo TV show for Xbox produced by Steven Spielberg leading as its flagship original series.